This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
Welcome to Side Hustle School. Welcome as well to Throwback Thursday. This is our weekly segment where we take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved considerably since we first featured them. My name is Chris Guillebeau, your host. I have the privilege of bringing you these stories, tips, case studies, actions, all with the goal of helping you create more freedom for yourself. Create more freedom for yourself through the form of a money-making project,
all kinds of different ideas that we have featured in the course of 1,650 episodes of the podcast. What a journey it's been. Now, last week on this segment, we heard from a sex-positive blogger who publishes a long-running site that reviews toys and other adult products. Well, new direction this week, today's episode like 99.5% of Side Hustle School is completely family-friendly. So if you've got your kids, it's all good. Today we're talking about plants, which actually feels like 20% of
Side Hustle School recently. I've had so many stories about people making aquariums or this guy in Toronto who is the plant influencer doing all these corporate workshops by Zoom. Who else was it? I believe a woman in Pittsburgh who opened a retail plant store during the pandemic. What can you say? It's the year of the plant. In this feature, we'll hear from Dave Stevens, the founder
of IGWorks. IG stands for indoor garden, I believe. They offer smart indoor gardening kits for anyone who wants to grow farm-fresh produce year-round. This is pretty cool. You can actually grow a farm in your small studio apartment. Maybe not an entire farm, but they have this product
called the iHarvest, which is an amazing invention. I encourage you to just Google it and go look at the pictures. There's a video as well. An amazing invention that allows you to grow up to 30 large plants in a small space. They claim that you can grow $1,000 worth of food in a year. IGWorks had
a hugely successful crowdfunding campaign that we covered in episode 888. Now that's been a while. Of course, we've also had a pandemic which had a lot of people spending a lot of time indoors. What has happened during all that time? Well, let's hear directly from Dave and I'll come back at the end to wrap us up. Hey, my name is Dave Stevens. I'm located in San Clemente, California. In the name
of my side hustle business is IGWorks. That stands for indoor garden works. You can check us out at igworks.com. We were last featured on episode number 888 of the side hustle school podcast. IGWorks makes attractive indoor gardening kits. These kits allow folks to grow everything from
cucumbers and tomatoes to microgreens indoors all year long. I think the most important aspect of our products is not just our attention to detail or to functionality, but also to beauty and usability and space consciousness as well. More and more of us are living in small spaces, and when you're living in a small space, every square foot of space counts. We know that it's not enough to allow our customers just to garden indoors. It has to be done in an attractive environment that also adds beauty and value to our living spaces. Since we were last featured on the show, sales of our
flagship products, the eye harvest indoor garden, have grown tremendously. During COVID especially, I think people are looking for new sustainable and fun hobbies that they can enjoy while they're spending that extra time at home. So while the eye harvest isn't inexpensive, it's a beautiful product that pays for itself over time, and it does so while you're growing your own fresh food that happens to be free of herbicides and pesticides. The value proposition has led to a lot of great word of mouth and a lot of happy new customers. We've also released our second major product, the eye harvest microgreen garden. It's a much smaller system for growing microgreens
naturally in the comfort of your kitchen and the kitchen countertop, but the value proposition is very much the same. You're growing your own healthier home-grown food free of herbicides and pesticides while enjoying the experience of gardening and saving money over time. I think our greatest challenge has been keeping up with demand for our products, especially while supply chains have slowed down due to COVID. We've sold out twice in the last year. Fortunately, while it has slowed down sales a bit, most of our customers do seem to understand the value proposition of the eye harvest and gardening indoors well enough that they're willing to order our products in advance. Our first product, the eye harvest indoor garden, came to fruition from
understanding that there was really a pent-up demand for products that allowed folks to garden real food at home, no matter how small of a living space those folks have. Designing of products like that was a lot harder than I ever expected, but when we raised about a quarter of a million dollars on Kickstarter, I obviously knew that we had something pretty special. Since then, the company's goals have been to provide great products and outstanding customer service. Whenever we can, we like to give back by providing discount codes. For example, right now we're offering 50 bucks off for using the discount code ENDCANCER. That's one word,
ENDCANCER. So in addition to offering $50 off for those customers, we also donate $50 to the American Cancer Society every time that discount code is used. It's a special thing to be able to give back, especially to an organization as important as the American Cancer Society, but every month we're creating new discount codes for new charities and we're allowing our customers to choose the discount code that they want to use to give to the causes that are most important to them. For those that may want to start their own business in the gardening space, I think the best advice that I can give is to recognize there's a new type of gardener emerging. These gardeners don't always have a lot of indoor space or outdoor space for that matter and they're not always very experienced. So simplicity is key. Also key is attractiveness and beauty because nobody wants to
be trapped in a small space with an unattractive garden. It's been a real pleasure speaking with the side hustle school over the past year. I appreciate the opportunity to share the iHarvest indoor garden and the company IG works with our other products with a much wider audience and I hope that many more will be inspired to start their own side hustles from listening to this and many of your other episodes too. Awesome thank you so much Dave. Really great to hear how well things are going. As I said it is a remarkable invention the iHarvest and as you heard from him they have
other products and such now too. Dave's feet are clearly planted in the roots of this business. He's even branching out to new products. I'm almost done okay. I know what you're thinking.
What a relief. Check out Dave's website at igworks.com or follow them on Facebook or Instagram at indoor garden works and just a reminder his discount code end cancer for $50 off. As you heard they also donate $50 to the American Cancer Society whenever that code is used. I'm already looking around my apartment asking myself do I have room for an iHarvest? Where will it go?
What will I do with it? All right indoor garden works. This was one of our most popular new features of 2020. The whole throwback Thursday thing. So as you have heard we have been continuing it this year. Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of
more than a thousand stories. If you have an update, a question for us, sidehustleschool.com/questions. Thank you for joining me today. I hope you'll come back tomorrow. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.
